A perfunctory associated series, the Last Rebel sequence, begins with The Last Rebel ( 2003).Īn earlier sequence, the Devil's/Whitfield series beginning with The Devil's Kiss ( 1980), is supernatural horror. Later enemies include socialists worldwide, whom the United Nations hires Raines to destroy the charismatic leader of a fundamentalist Christian sect and Nazis in Africa. The rest of America, now decadently liberal, attempts to destroy the new land but fails. Perhaps rather oddly – as Paul Brians notes in Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895-1984 ( 1987) – the Utopia created by the main protagonist, General Ben Raines (and his Rebel followers) in the establishing volumes of this sequence constitutes, in fact, a socialism from above, with equality for women, compulsory identity cards, hierarchically controlled worker-ownership of factories, and so forth. If it then proves impossible to establish a Libertarian Utopia in southern America without breaking a few eggs, then – as the remaining volumes of the sequence demonstrate – so be it. The premise of the first volume is, perhaps, surprisingly frank: shocked by the imposition of gun controls, and the depredations of Federal government and the unions, a group of patriotic US citizens bring about the nuclear holocaust in the expectation that a better world will, phoenix-style, be born out of the Ashes. Johnstone was initially best known for Westerns, which he continued to produce he wrote considerable supernatural Horror in his later career, as well as the Ashes sequence of Survivalist-Fiction military Post-Holocaust sf novels, which began with Out of the Ashes ( 1983) and terminated thirty-four instalments later with Escape from the Ashes ( 2003).

(1938-2004) US author identified as the author of over 170 novels since his first in 1980, a few of these being as by William Mason titles after circa 2003 were seemingly written in collaboration after his death, his name may have been used as a House Name, though more recently the Johnstone series were taken over by J A Johnstone, writing either as in collaboration with Johnstone, or solo.

The nursery william w johnstone